Look around the room you’re in right now — as your eyes glance across each object, do the names for those objects come to you? Can you suppress those names?

Can you think about anything without thinking of the word for it?

Do Spirit Guides Even Have Names?

Some psychics readily provide the names of spirit guides and other entities during readings. Sonia Choquette does. Sylvia Browne always has. I tell my clients their spirit guides’ names, too, when they ask. I’m certainly in good company among those intuitives who do.

There are intuitives who are absolutely vehement in their blanket statements that spirit guides do not have names.

I will not name names here. It has bothered me (just a little bit, in the past ) if they ridiculed those of us who do. I’m totally fine with agreeing to disagree, with recognizing that we have a different philosophy about the subject, with accepting the possibility that I receive a type of information during readings that they simply do not.

I can at least follow the logic others set forth about why spirit guides might not have names — but I’m not going to make their arguments for them here.

I do wish that rather than making “absolute” statements and passing judgments and declaring “facts” about Mysteries that can never be completely known, that they would just tell their clients “I don’t get names for spirit guides” and leave it at that. Maybe even refer those people to those of us who do.

Want to know the real, bottom-line reason why I give out spirit guide names during readings?

My clients ask me.

It’s really as simple as that — clients ask me questions, and I give them the best answer that I can. So, if a client asks me “What’s my spirit guide’s name?” (they always do; nearly everyone will throw this in before we get off the phone) and I hear a very distinct and clear answer, how could I do anything other than pass it on?

I never intended to offer professional readings when I started Shift Your Spirits — I blogged about my experiences with angels and spirit guides and I referred to them by name because… in my perception, they have names.

During the month of September 2006, when this blog was only a month old, I was already receiving an average of five emails per day — all asking some form of the same question:

“Can you tell me the name of my spirit guide?”

My response was to try. It seemed that I could. So I did.

Sure, there was a philosophical debate playing in my head, especially when I read or heard other intuitives publicly dismissing it. I did think “How do I know I’m not just assigning these names? Or somehow creating them?”

I name everything — I name my computers and my cars… How did I know that I wasn’t willfully attaching names to my clients’ spirit guides or putting thoughts in their heads?

There was a point only a few weeks into answering that first wave of requests for spirit guide name readings where I even thought “Maybe I shouldn’t be telling people this…”

But I received email after email after email from almost all those clients with some story about why or how those names were significant.

Sometimes, they were the very “nicknames” they had given their angels and guides.

Or the names by which they already knew their guides.

The names other psychics had told them in the past.

Sometimes they were recurring family names.

Or names with which they’d always felt a special connection.

And even with those names that were a bit “odd” or “random” — or even the ones that the clients might not have chosen for their spirit guides to go by, if it had been left up to them — phenomenal instances of synchronicity would occur.

I would hear back from my clients in a day or two, or maybe a week, about the Signs they experienced surrounding the spirit guide’s name that I had shared with them.

The name started popping up in a rapid succession of common events — name tags on worker bees in fast food drive-thrus and big box retail stores.

Emails from people with that name (some of them strangers).

Talking heads on TV with those names in digital ribbons at the bottom of the screen.

Books nearly falling off shelves by authors with the same names as their spirit guides, or at least a close spelling.

You can invite your spirit guides to do this — right now, yourself. Ask them for clear, physical, unmistakable signs.

These experiences delighted my clients. They still do. It’s spiritually empowering and emotionally positive. It feels like Something Great is winking at you, just letting you know It’s there.

It can allow someone to feel that there is magic and wonder in the world.

Do I know how these serendipities find us or what is generating these synchronicities? Do I know why it happens?

No, I can’t say that I know such a thing (anyone who uses the word know to describe the Mysteries is a delusional fool or a liar).

What I do believe — what I certainly feel — is that there is something to it, that it’s meaningful to others, and that I’ve been given the opportunity to participate in that.

Why would I refuse?

Names are powerful tools. Language is a technology.

Thoughts are things; and words are the handles by which we carry meaningful ideas around within us and hand them over to one another.